ing how they would crack down on illegal fireworks this year, rolling out multilingual billboards, setting up a new complaint hot line and establishing new fines for people caught with the black-market explosives.

But some Oakland residents say the window-rattling booms and bright flashes of illegal cherry bombs, Roman candles and M-80 explosives shot off this holiday weekend were just as bad, if not worse, than last year.

And no one was even answering the fireworks hot line, whose voice mail box quickly filled up and stopped accepting messages. Residents who turned to the Police Department’s non-emergency line to register complaints about fireworks fared only slightly better because officers were busy dealing with reckless driving “sideshows” in East Oakland and a large, post-fireworks fracas at Jack London Square.

The city has not yet provided statistics on the number of complaint calls received, the num-

ber of citations issued or the number of illegal fireworks confiscated.

But by Monday morning the streets, sidewalks and medians of Oakland were littered with colorful wrappers, cardboard mortar tubes and gunpowder residue — unmistakable evidence the message is not getting through.

“It was like a war,” said Karin Mac Donald, who lives in the Prescott neighborhood of West Oakland. “There was smoke hanging over West Oakland … people had open fireworks dis-

plays on 12th and Peralta (streets). You could see more fireworks in West Oakland than you could in San Francisco and Berkeley because of the fog.

“The little kids were sitting there, 4 years old, setting them off at 10:20 at night,” she fumed. “Did the ordinance work? No, it didn’t work.”

Mac Donald said many of her neighbors are afraid to leave home in case their homes catch fire. But she said she will not stay around next year.

That’s why Councilmember Nancy Nadel suffers through the Fourth of July onslaught each year — hose at the ready — in case an errant missile lands on her roof and sets it ablaze.

Although her Dogtown neighborhood was awash in rockets’ red glare and bone-jarring explosions, she said she heard fewer fireworks going off in the days before the actual holiday. The July 4 bombardment also seemed to fizzle out earlier, she said.

“This year it ended in my neighborhood pretty much at midnight,” she said. “There were some later, definitely big, but it wasn’t as constant. Last year, it really felt like I was in a war zone.”

Nadel said the fireworks hot line might have been productive in the days leading up to the Fourth of July, but she acknowledged it must have been frustrating to those who called over the weekend and couldn’t get through.

The hot line was not staffed after 5 p.m. on weekdays or on the weekends, and no one seemed to know who was responsible for monitoring and logging the calls — the Police Department or city staff.

Council President Ignacio De La Fuente said he believes the city’s new fireworks law, which allows fines up to $1,000 for people caught possessing, selling or using illegal fireworks, as well as the multilingual billboards about the new law, had some impact this year.

He noted, for example, there appeared to be only one fireworks-related fire in Oakland — a one-alarm house blaze on Myrtle Street that displaced nine adults and seven children — compared to last year, when there were seven fires attributed to fireworks, and the year before when there were 12.

Still, he acknowledged there is a lot work to do before the city gets a handle on its fireworks problem.

“We hoped that things (would have) worked the way we planned them,” De La Fuente said. “It was a two-pronged campaign — one was education of the new ordinance, and then the hot line. It was not staffed on the Fourth of July … but it wasn’t just for the Fourth of July.”

Complaints to the hot line and other sources helped police seize large caches of illegal fireworks in the days before the holiday.

Deputy Police Chief Pete Dunbar said officers seized several van loads of fireworks and destroyed them in a bomb shelter. Although fireworks were a high priority, police had a number of more urgent calls, such as violence and sideshow activities, to deal with.

“We had the staff to deal with fireworks but had to redeploy and shuffle some staff to deal with the sideshow problems,” Dunbar said.

A large crowd refused to leave and was setting off illegal fireworks after the sanctioned display at Jack London Square on Sunday. Police also arrested 15 people for blocking traffic.

Dunbar said most of the tips officers did receive pointed to addresses identified as problems by callers in previous years.

Lt. Lawrence Green said it was perhaps “overly ambitious” to expect results on the Fourth of July itself, when officers were pulled out of the neighborhoods to respond to problems in other parts of the city. But he thinks the new tools might help in the long run.

“None of us suspected there would be great results over Fourth of July, maybe before, but on July 4 it’s a free-for-all, it’s going to be noisy,” Green said. “I think we might be effective if (we cracked down) on our pre-identified people and problem spots, but we just don’t have enough people to do it. Over time, it could have a good positive impact.”

Humans weren’t the only ones suffering from the explosive effects of Fourth of July in Oakland. Glenn Howell, director of the Oakland Animal Shelter, said the facility ended up with 36 additional dogs and cats over the weekend that likely were spooked by the fireworks and had bolted from home. The shelter was closed for two days in a row, so anxious owners had to wait until Tuesday to see whether their pet had been picked up.

“We did get quite a few more dogs than usual,” Howell said. “We were packed. … Of the 36 new animals in, only five of them have owners that we can identify, the rest we don’t know who they belong to. That’s a lot in three days.”

Howell said the streets around the shelter, located in Jingletown, were littered with empty fireworks shell casings.

“Luckily for the dogs here, (the building) is pretty soundproofed,” he said. “The old place, the dogs were in kennels inside and outside, it was really bad for them.”